She sprang forward, throwing herself against the door as she locked it.
"Don't," she cried through it—"don't you ever dare do that again, Harry! Walk on your heels. You frighten me when you sneak like that—you—you—frighten—me."
Then she undressed, crying, tears rolling down to her high white chest and finally on to the crispiness of her plain nightgown. Crept to bed finally, into a darkness as sleek as a black cat's flank, silently, to save the sag of mattress, her body curving to the curve of her child's.
Once from the inky pool of that long night Zoe's hand crept up, finding out her mother's cheek.
"Lilly," floating up for a drowsy second to the surface of consciousness—"Lilly—you're crying. Are—you sad—again?"
"Yes, Zoe—terribly—terribly—"
CHAPTER III
The year that Zoe entered High School, 1914, out of an international sky of fairly pellucid blue, the thunderclap of world war burst in fury.
It was strange, though, even after the subsequent plunge of her country to the Allied flank, and the menacing and shifting tides of affairs creeping closer and closer to the edge of everyday life, how little the complexion of Lilly's routine was changed.
True, her national consciousness flared suddenly from lethargy to blaze. The evening after the sinking of the Lusitania, she attended a mass meeting in Astor Place with Zoe and Mrs. Blair, beating out an umbrella-and-floor tom-tom for redress, love of country suddenly a lump in her throat.